Accessibility, kinds, and laws: A structural explication
Philosophy of Science 61 (3):389-406 (1994)
| Abstract | "Accessibility" is a crucial concept of possible worlds semantics. The simplest approach to accessibility is the "magical theory" that construes this relation as analogous to spatial or temporal relations. In this paper I give a nonmagical structural account of the accessibility relation that can be used to give a necessitarian account of kinds and laws. Laws are characterized in a structural way as stable invariants of the world's gestalt. Finally, I point out how the structural approach can be embedded in a general representational theory of modality | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,672 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesAlexander Bird (1999). Explanation and Laws. Synthese 120 (1):1--18.
Alice Drewery (2001). Dispositions and Ceteris Paribus Laws. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (4):723-733.
Gregory M. Mikkelson (2003). Ecological Kinds and Ecological Laws. Philosophy of Science 70 (5):1390-1400.
Nobu-Yuki Suzuki (1997). Kripke Frame with Graded Accessibility and Fuzzy Possible World Semantics. Studia Logica 59 (2):249-269.
Bernhard Nickel (2010). Ceteris Paribus Laws: Generics and Natural Kinds. Philosophers' Imprint 10 (06).
Peter Kroes (1989). Structural Analogies Between Physical Systems. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 40 (2):145-154.
Thomas Mormann (1995). Incompatible Empirically Equivalent Theories: A Structural Explication. Synthese 103 (2):203 - 249.
Thomas Mormann (1992). Structural Accessibility and Similarity of Possible Worlds. Journal of Philosophical Logic 21 (2):149 - 172.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads13 ( #87,888 of 549,069 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,185 of 549,069 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
